Japan's space agency suspended a planned launch on Monday of an H-IIA rocket that was to carry a moon lander into space, according to operator Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI).
    • @orizuru
      12•1 year ago

      It’s the cool retro thing all the kids are doing these days.

      The 60s are in again.

    • Chariotwheel
      -3•1 year ago

      Earth’s fucked. Accelerating plans to advance technology so we can fuck up another planet.

      And “we”, I am mean “them”. The wealthy and their servants.

      • @nexusband@lemmy.world
        6•1 year ago

        Earth is not fucked, but having a proper moon base makes key technologys a necessity, like really large scale co2 scrubbers. Also, the moon is basically a new gold mine for Helium-3, which is going to be very important in the future.

        Having large scale co2 scrubbers makes a huge difference on earth as well.

        • Bloops
          1•1 year ago

          Helium-3 is a fuel for fusion that does have its benefits, but most scientists are focused on Deuterium-Tritium reactions. On the moon, the most concentrated regolith has only 50 parts of helium-3 per billion. That is super sparse. Like, we may as well be sifting uranium out of Earth’s oceans at that point. And if we’re doing giant space-based megaprojects, the gas giants probably have higher concentrations of helium-3 or we could just beam power around from giant solar panels.

      • Bloops
        1•1 year ago

        This is a fair argument against Elon Musk’s dream to colonize Mars - it is indeed an escapist fantasy. But with the recent and upcoming moon missions, the involved parties (government orgs!) are quite clear that they’re not doing it out of a false belief that they can make a self-sustaining colony. That stuff is over a century away. Only billionaires and their simps believe it lol.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Tokyo-based startup ispace’s (9348.T) lunar lander Hakuto-R Mission 1 failed in April.

    JAXA was planning to start SLIM’s moon landing in January-February 2024 after Monday’s launch, aiming to follow the success of India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar exploration mission this month.

    The rocket was also carrying an X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency.

    H-IIA, jointly developed by JAXA and MHI, has been Japan’s flagship space launch vehicle, with a success rate of 98% since 2001.

    However, after JAXA’s new medium-lift H3 rocket failed on its debut in March, the agency postponed the launch of H-IIA No.

    Japan’s recent space-related efforts have faced other setbacks, with the launch failure of the Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test last month.

    The original article contains 279 words, the summary contains 136 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!